March 23, 2013

Remember a couple of weeks ago when the Washington Post splashed so heavily the ludicrous story about the "mysterious" murder of the black, gay politician in Clarksdale in Coahoma County, Mississippi? The black killer crashed the black victim's stolen car, then confessed to the Coahoma sheriff department, headed by a black sheriff, where he had stashed the body of the black man running against the black mayor's black son. But who cares about the facts of the case when the story gives you a chance to talk about Mississippi's “dark history of racial brutality"?

Why has the last week seen the national media break out into a frenzy over the specter of white racism?

Perhaps it goes back to the February 27th oral arguments at the Supreme Court over whether or not to bid adieu to Title 5 of the Voting Rights Act after 48 years. Justice Scalia's question about the "perpetuation of racial entitlement," about how quickly we glide from a world where affirmative action can't be ended because the beneficiaries are too weak to one where they are too strong, definitely got the press's goat. Scalia suggested that the Supreme Court is the only institution left in America with the independence and the moral backbone to say Enough Time Has Passed.

Gregory B. Craig, a Washington lawyer, was White House counsel from January 2009 to January 2010.

On Aug. 6, 1965, I was working in Coahoma County, Miss., trying to register new voters at the courthouse in Clarksdale. ...

That summer, we persuaded 500 African American citizens in Coahoma County to try to register to vote. ... The summer of 1965 was hot and tense, but it was not as violent as the previous summer, when three workers were murdered in Neshoba County and when the chief of police in Clarksdale, Ben Collins, reportedly shot a black boy in the head in a public playground. Nonetheless, I lived in fear ... on the dusty streets of these small Delta towns ...

Just before we left Clarksdale to drive out to Friars Point the night of Aug. 6, we learned that President Lyndon Johnson had signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and that the U.S. government would be sending federal registrars to Mississippi.

That was a moment of real hope and change.

You know how the neoconservatives view the whole world as if it's always Czechoslovakia in 1938? For the Washington Post editorial board, among others, various ramshackle overseas menaces (Iran/q, Hezbollah, etc.) are always the new Nazi Germany that must be crushed now before they blitzkrieg the world with their unstoppable military juggernauts.

Similarly, for the mainstream media when it comes to race, it's always Clarksdale, Mississippi in 1965. It never gets old.

Steve, perhaps the young bloods of the liberal 60s need to constantly try to remake the US into Clarksdale in 1965, or else they'll become old and shrivel up and die. They are hard at work trying to remake the US into the Deep South, so as to really show us their halo, how superior they are, and impress all the girls with their absolute daring, sensitivity, and concern. Downright heroes they are, really.

It's always amused me how people say that, on the one hand, "Dreamers" shouldn't be punished for the sins of their parents, but, on the other, we should be eternally punished for the sins of ours. That, in fact, we should be punished on behalf of whole new groups who weren't even here when those sins were committed.

Agreements between nations on the rules of war (Geneva convention)have banned collective punishments, lest the entire population become ripe for slaughter. I wish our social planners would get the memo.

"neoconservatives view the whole world as if it's always Czechoslovakia in 1938"

More like Czechoslovakia in 1968:

No, the original comment was correct. They view everything as Czechoslovakia 1938 because that was the time when they feel the West could have prevented the anti-semite from wrecking havoc on the world. Present day Iran is seen as an anti-semitic threat.

The media seems to have as it's task the continual stirring of the pot and to keep blacks in a state of anger by constantly reprising everything bad that's ever happened. Every year we have the same drawn out commemoration of St. Emmett Till. He made some moves on someone else's wife and got killed as a result, a story that's so commonplace as to be hardly worth reporting on except for the race angle involved. Emmett and Trayvon are constantly put before the black public as martyrs; but both were just dumb punks who got themselves killed through their own misbehavior. Yet people like Ronald McNair, black astronaut killed in the Challenger disaster, are rarely covered. The media wants blacks to be angry over something and to keep them that way.

Conservatives warning about Czechoslovakia Steve are correct. Weakness, appeasement, giving in, kicking the can down the road, are intrinsic to democracies, which prefer peace at any price now to War today, even if War is inevitable and it is a question of on what terms and how well or poorly the war will be conducted. Nations almost never fare better putting off an inevitable conflict to gain a few minutes respite.

This truth is eternal. The Greeks knew it, so did the Romans. So too, the Founding Fathers. And the Swiss. THAT is human nature.

The Clarksdale 1965 stuff -- no one believes it. That's just more White people (elites) hating other White people (non elites, Southern Whites).

The problem with Paleos is their world view is as warped and out of concert with reality as liberals are with modern social relations between Blacks and Whites. It's not 1965; but with a withdrawing Pax Americana, sweetness and light don't proliferate, rather nukes and ugly conflicts suppressed by the duopoly Superpowers crop up. Now the US is getting punked by North Korea, response being a shadow play of interceptors, yanking missile defense (against Iranian nukes) out of Poland.

When you are weak, North Korea's latest kid dictator threatens to nuke you. And does so with impunity. Heck, you don't even need a Third Reich industrial base; China, Russia, Iran, will all help a place like North Korea go nuclear as an outsourced threat to the US.

"The media wants blacks to be angry over something and to keep them that way.

If all you are capable of doing is writing, it helps to have lots of folks around with little capacity for long-term-horizon thinking but a good capacity for staying aggrieved. Does wonders for the Power of the Pen. Otherwise people might find themselves thinking coherently about flaws in your impeccably trenchant logic and might not spring to arms when you call for a long hot summer.

The real error was the pledge to Poland in 1939. It couldn't be enforced and just turned Hitler's drive eastward against the USSR, westward against the U.K. and France instead. The correct strategy would have been to have done nothing at all. Let Hitler consume Poland, then attack the USSR. Let these two tyrannies wear each other out and watch the show from the sidelines. While re-arming of course, and waiting for the right time to intervene. Encouraging the generals too overthrow corporal Hitler would have also been a good idea too.

There is another area of popular and official thought that reminds me of our current racial attitudes. The War Against Fat.

America's approach to the issue of black people is certainly wacky. It's hard to understand how the public can believe so many odd ideas. Black people are economically backward in America as they are everywhere else in the world. They commit lots of violent crime - again as they do also elsewhere. Corner a liberal with these facts and they don't bother to try to refute them. Sometimes they go into a "legacy of slavery" recitation but often they just recommend better education. Of course education is the one area in which blacks have failed most often. No education program or reform has closed the racial learning gap after decades of trying and trillions of dollars spent.

There is a similar example of upside down thinking in the diet/health industry.

In the supermarket half of all products are labeled "Low Fat". Because food has to be made of something, if you reduce the fat you increase the carbohydrates. So Americans are presented with more and more refined sugars and grains. Animal husbanders have known since the neolithic revolution that you fatten up animals with grain. The marbling in your T-Bone is there because it's "grain fed" beef. Grass fed cattle are much leaner.

So in the name of health we fatten ourselves up and get diabetes and heart disease. In many ways the "paleo diet" bloggers are like the "racial realist" bloggers. They are fighting against a conventional wisdom that is nearly universal but clearly wrong.

It's always amused me how people say that, on the one hand, "Dreamers" shouldn't be punished for the sins of their parents, but, on the other, we should be eternally punished for the sins of ours. That, in fact, we should be punished on behalf of whole new groups who weren't even here when those sins were committed."

Well said. "We" have done nothing wrong, really, even when we've done something terrible. "You" on the other had are guilty of every terrible thing imaginable, even though you've done nothing wrong.

I rarely hear anyone mention Czechoslovakia in 1938 in the United States including the neo-cons. And why would they? Who is threatening a democracy in the way Germany threatened war over Czechoslovakia? Iraq did not ask for Kuwait, which was not a democracy anyway - they took it. The neo-cons, do not have Munich on their mind. This is simply wrong. They have Normandy on their mind - all the time. Someone is always waiting to be "liberated" - this is their error, their foolishness, not disliking appeasement. No one should like appeasement whether 1938 or now.

Let's see the Czech crisis in 1938 involved the Sudenten Germans wanting to live under German rule. The USA fought WW1 for "democracy" and the right of peoples to live under their chosen government. How is it appeasing to Germany when a large population of neighboring Germans wish to join the Reich?

Sixty years later neoconservatives had no problem supporting ethnic Albanians in their desire to break away from Serbia.

Five years ago neoconservatives rejected the desires of the South Ossetians to break free from Georgia.

So it appears it is not an appeasement issue, but rather another case of who, whom?

The strong are appeased and the weak are bullied. Those Middle Eastern Scots-Irish are strong. Arabs are weak.

On ww2. Britain should have let Hitler and Stalin divide up Poland. It was no skin of any Englishman's nose what happened in Danzig or Warsaw. The Polsih Scots-Irish otoh they had everything to lose in the German zone of partition and the Polish Scots-Irish in the USSR zone had everything to gain. Chamberlain was suckered into a declaration of war by advisors. Why didn't he declare war on the Soviets after they also invaded Poland? You don't have to answer that.

You make some very good points. I never got what Neville Chamberlain's problem was. England had no alliance or treaty with Czechoslovakia and it had a 22% German minority. Yet he went and stuck his nose in that affair, then came back waving his paper. Ditto the U.K. had no alliance or territorial commitments with Poland, which also had a sizable German population and was run by a cabal of generals. He also stuck his nose in there, even though Danzig was indisputably a German city. His pledge to Poland was ludicrous, unenforcable and didn't save that nation. It only resulted in unleashing Nazi Germany upon his own country, when it could have easily avoided war and watched Stalin and Hitler tear each other apart from the sidelines. I always figured he was just stupid, or arrogant, but your comments about advisers with their own agenda makes much sense, especially since the equally guilty USSR was given a complete pass on devouring its half of Poland. It reminds me a bit about the Irish M.P. who recently went on a rant about how Ireland's neutrality in WW2 was immoral. It turns out this "Irish" M.P. is actually a Jew. Of course, its very easy for a Jew, to say Irish blood should be shed for THEIR benefit. The Irish people, presumably, can be forgiven for having some ideas of their own.

Here's the Google Wallet FAQ. From it: "You will need to have (or sign up for) Google Wallet to send or receive money. If you have ever purchased anything on Google Play, then you most likely already have a Google Wallet. If you do not yet have a Google Wallet, don’t worry, the process is simple: go to wallet.google.com and follow the steps." You probably already have a Google ID and password, which Google Wallet uses, so signing up Wallet is pretty painless.

You can put money into your Google Wallet Balance from your bank account and send it with no service fee.

Google Wallet works from both a website and a smartphone app (Android and iPhone -- the Google Wallet app is currently available only in the U.S., but the Google Wallet website can be used in 160 countries).

Or, once you sign up with Google Wallet, you can simply send money via credit card, bank transfer, or Wallet Balance as an attachment from Google's free Gmail email service. Here'show to do it.

(Non-tax deductible.)

Fourth: if you have a Wells Fargo bank account, you can transfer money to me (with no fees) via Wells Fargo SurePay. Just tell WF SurePay to send the money to my ancient AOL email address steveslrATaol.com -- replace the AT with the usual @). (Non-tax deductible.)

Fifth: if you have a Chase bank account (or, theoretically,other bank accounts), you can transfer money to me (with no fees) via Chase QuickPay (FAQ). Just tell Chase QuickPay to send the money to my ancient AOL email address (steveslrATaol.com -- replace the AT with the usual @). If Chase asks for the name on my account, it's Steven Sailer with an n at the end of Steven. (Non-tax deductible.)

My Book:

"Steve Sailer gives us the real Barack Obama, who turns out to be very, very different - and much more interesting - than the bland healer/uniter image stitched together out of whole cloth this past six years by Obama's packager, David Axelrod. Making heavy use of Obama's own writings, which he admires for their literary artistry, Sailer gives the deepest insights I have yet seen into Obama's lifelong obsession with 'race and inheritance,' and rounds off his brilliant character portrait with speculations on how Obama's personality might play out in the Presidency." - John Derbyshire Author, "Prime Obsession: Bernhard Riemann and the Greatest Unsolved Problem in Mathematics" Click on the image above to buy my book, a reader's guide to the new President's autobiography.